I worried about the milk-siblings offer for a few days, and then called a mutual
friend, also a parent, named Amy. Amy is very logical. She'd know what
to do in this situation. "My instinct is that Anastasia sees nursing each
other's babies as a way for you two to bond," she told me. "You're
very close and this is an expression of that intimacy." Amy's take
was so different than the hysterical rant in my head, I at once felt more relaxed. "If
you don't want to do it, I think you can just acknowledge how beautiful
it is that you are so close," continued Amy. "And you don't
have to let her nurse Skuli to demonstrate that." Just hearing Amy frame
it as bonding took the pressure off of me and with that, some of the judgmental
thoughts I'd been having about Anastasia. If anything, I thought, it's more
of a limitation on my part — I should just own up to that. We are close.
I can tell her that I'm just not comfortable with our kids being milk siblings.
Soon after our conversation, Anastasia had her son. Her delivery didn't go at all as she'd planned.
After three days of stalling labor, she had an emergency C-section and was utterly
flattened by the experience. Her boyfriend, who had practiced for months to coach
her through natural childbirth, didn't know what to do to help his shivering,
shell-shocked partner. She lay there on her side after having her stomach and
uterus stitched back up, but when her doula brought her son in and rolled him
onto her breast, he latched on and began sucking hard. Just like that, she
started to heal from the difficulty of the past three days. Anastasia's
luck with nursing held. She could squirt milk into Lionel's mouth from
several inches away, like a fountain. She could nurse standing up, talking on
the phone and while making homemade ravioli. (Meanwhile, I had to "get
into position" — propping up a pillow and cupping my breast as if
screwing together a pipe — for several weeks before nursing was even remotely
casual.)
"Maybe I'll nurse him right now," I said, feeling sort of vulnerable in the offering.
A few months after Lionel was born, I returned from a particularly draining two
weeks on book tour with Skuli. I had lurched past the point of looking slim again
after pregnancy and was scarecrow-thin, with staticky hair and a zitty complexion
that bespoke red-eye flights and Starbucks dining. I sunk into an armchair at
her apartment, watching gratefully as she effortlessly entertained Skuli. She
listened sympathetically as I told her boring tales of the book tour. Then, just
as she was bringing me fresh coffee and making Skuli laugh, I was overcome
by how fortunate I was that we were friends and could share this parenting experience.
Lionel began crying from his room. "Hey," I said suddenly, when she
returned with him, "we never did that nursing thing you mentioned back
before Lionel was born."
"I know," she said.
"Maybe I'll nurse him right now," I said, feeling sort of vulnerable
in the offering, as if I was actually the weird Angelina friend. "If that
sounds okay to you."
"Well, I just read Lionel's horoscope and it said he was going to get nourishment
from exotic sources this week," Anastasia said. "So that would make
his horoscope true."
I took him and rearranged my shirt and bra to expose my breast. Skuli sat on
the floor, not seeming to think anything weird was going on. I put Lionel on
my chest and he began sucking. The familiar tug made the milk rush in; his
sucking strength and style were different than Skuli's, his little face
so incredibly sweet. It felt really . . . normal. Anastasia fed Skuli, too, and
because he was older and had teeth, she got her first bite.
A few months later, over drinks and a bit tipsy in that way that makes me confess
everything, I revealed to another friend, Gillian, that Skuli and Lionel were
milk-siblings. "You're kidding," she said.
"No," I said. "It's true."
"I'm so jealous," she said. "I was too afraid to bring that up to any of my friends."
©2007 Jennifer Baumgardner and Nerve Media
About the Author
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Jennifer Baumgardner is a Brooklyn-based magazine writer and author. She is the co-author of Manifesta and Grassroots, and the author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics.
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